Listening to Mr Arun Nanda of Club Mahindra Resorts ------------ An Employee, A Professional and A Customer

Mr Arun Nanda (Executive Director and President, Infrastructure Development Sector, Mahindra & Mahindra) spoke recently at Mahindra Satyam School of Leadership on “Building Businesses and Extending one’s limits”. The talk left me with some strong feelings and questions. To start with let me share the positive feelings:

• Wit and Simplicity of such an accomplished leader who won quite a few laurels and has quite a few awards to his credit including a knighthood
• Wonderful Examples he shared on Respect for People as demonstrated repeatedly by Anand Mahindra.
• Opportunities and Encouragement provided to employees of Mahindra Group to display their talent and Recognizing them for their achievements
• The four principles for success – Work Hard , Live, Learn and Play
• Importance of having a Clean and Clear Conscience
• Financial acumen and astuteness by which a 18 Crore initial investment grew to a 4000 Crore market cap
• The happiness and self satisfaction he openly exhibited while demonstrating the Mahindra World City – Chennai (particularly the railway station)
• Credit given to his mentors and to the prayers of his parents for his success

As he was speaking, what crossed my mind was a question - Why there is no cultural integration in this group? Of course while it was also mentioned that full freedom is given to Leaders (as Mr Nanda put it even Sons in Family run Organizations do not get the kind of freedom enjoyed by CEO’s in Mahindra Group), the thought that was repeatedly bothering me was - Should there not be some semblance of cultural integration across all group companies.

The negative feelings were those concerning Club Mahindra. As a Purple Color Time Shareholder, I wasnt too happy listening to Mr. Nanda detailing the tons of money he made for Shareholders and Promoters of Club Mahindra. He didn’t seem to be too bothered about the customers/time share holders who might be sitting in the audience. The reason for my consternation was:

• Being a member for over 11 Years, I find that the services and new locations haven’t increased even by 1/3rd. How many Munnars do we have?
• More Resorts (own) could have been opened in many more states. For instance there are none in Andhra, Orissa or Madhya Pradesh. Even in a place like ooty there is no own resort. One wonder's what happened to the beautiful "Danish Villa"?
• Most of the tie up’s aren’t that great, when compared to their own resorts
• It has become very difficult to get the bookings/reservation even though being a Purple color time share holder. One needs to book well in advance and for salaried class such advance bookings usually end up in cancellations.
• An annual maintenance service charge of over Rs 9000/- needs to be paid irrespective of utilizing the time share facility. This wasn’t the part of the contract which I entered into when I bought the time share but subsequently was thrust upon me.
• As mentioned by Mr Nanda, while Club Mahindra is minting money through over 90% capacity utilization on the unused annual credit days of the Time Share Holders, they have no concept or practice to share at least a part of the booty with the time share holder. For instance at least 25% as annual dividend on income earned from the unused time share, or at least by way of a discount on the annual maintenance charges.
• In the recent IPO, no provision was made to allot shares (at least a separate quota if not a firm allotment) to time share holders.

Ultimately I left the hall wondering and with lots of questions and mixed feelings.